Good morning! My wife and I are wrapping up a quick getaway as this issue is landing in your inbox—meaning it was written on the plane last Wednesday while we were en route to our destination—so apologies ahead of time for not having anything to say about whatever excitement went down over the weekend (which, between the Japanese Grand Marathon Championship, WR attempt at the Copenhagen Half Marathon, TNF Endurance Challenge Wisconsin, and other events, I’m sure there was plenty). 

I’ve really come to look forward to this annual early fall vacation we’ve been taking for the past several years. It serves as a forced pause of sorts, which, “like yeast: you don’t need much, but it is a vital ingredient.” This is not a slow time of the year for me by any means—I have athletes racing nearly every weekend, fall marathon season is in full effect, I’m traveling a ton for work, and the dash to the end-of-the-year finish is just beginning to kick into high gear—but that’s exactly why we get away when we do: it forces my wife and I to hit pause so we can recharge a bit and close out 2019 not hanging on by a thread. I liken it to sitting out the first couple minutes of the fourth quarter so that we’re able to contribute the rest of the game. 

OK, with all that out of the way, let’s get right to it.

What (or who, rather) I've been thinking about:

— Woody Motherf*ckin’ Kincaid’s 12:58.10 for 5000m on a random Tuesday night in Beaverton, Oregon. To be fair, his two Bowerman Track Club teammates, Olympian Lopez Lomong and reigning Olympic 1500m champion Matthew Centrowitz, ran extremely fast as well (13:00.13 and 13:00.39, respectively), all three men easily running under the Olympic standard of 13:13.50, but no one, including Kincaid himself, expected the 26-year-old to run the fifth fastest 5,000 meters ever by an American man. “If the crowd wasn’t here, I would have run 13:20 tonight,” Kincaid, who took 14 seconds off his previous personal best, told the media afterward.

And while Kincaid’s performance last Tuesday seemingly came out of nowhere, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention in recent years. Kincaid ran under a great coach in Rob Conner at the University of Portland—the same program that produced 2:09 marathoner and top-10 Boston and NYC marathon finisher Scott Fauble—and BTC coach Jerry Schumacher wouldn’t even have let him on the squad if he didn’t think Kincaid had world-class potential. Heck, he’s one of four guys on the same team with a 5,000m PB of 13-flat or faster—that kind of depth doesn’t exist anywhere outside of East Africa. That being said, Kincaid is still something of an underdog—he’s yet to qualify for a U.S. team—yet now he’s one of the fastest U.S. 5000-meter men of all-time and the eighth fastest guy in the world right now. It’s just a great story no matter how you slice it and the sport has itself a new star less than 12 months out from the Olympic Games. Kincaid’s best quality? The kid can close! His finishing kick has been lauded elsewhere and it was on display last Tuesday as he blew past teammate Lopez Lomong in the last half-lap to take the win and pop a world-class time. 

— Justin Grunewald. Truth is, I’m thinking about this guy every day. Not only is he one of my athletes, he’s become a very close friend over the past couple years. As you might expect, Justin has been struggling mightily since his wife Gabe’s passing in June, but he’s also been working hard to provide hope for others through her foundation, Brave Like Gabe. Justin made his 50-mile debut this past weekend at the North Face Endurance Challenge in Wisconsin—it hadn’t happened as of me writing this last Wednesday, hence the lack of results here—and used it as an opportunity to raise money for rare cancer research. Several thousand dollars had been pledged already, less than a week out. A couple pieces have been written about him recently, including this one by Taylor Dutch at Runner’s World and this article by Henry Howard at RunSpirited. I’m so proud of this guy: for what he stands for, for what he’s running for, for the hope he’s spreading, and for the impact he’s making. 

What I've been reading:

— The Greatest 100 Miles [Ever Run]: Cavin Woodward’s 11:38:54 clocking in 1975 isn’t the world-record for the distance—it was for many years, however—but it still might be the greatest 100 miles ever run. Not that there’s any easy way to run 100 miles, much less do it in world-record time, but Woodward did it the hardest way I can imagine, passing 50 miles in a then world record of 4:58:53 (the first person to average under 6-minute miles for the distance) and then “hanging on” for a 6:40:01 back half of the race. His first mile was a ridiculous and generally inadvisable 5:19. (In a contrast of styles, Zach Bitter, who just ran 11:19:13 to take almost 11 minutes off the previous world-record, clocked negative splits of 5:40:38 and 5:38:35.) “The reason why I go out in front is because I want to run my own race,” said Woodward, who passed away in 2010. “If you are in a bunch, and the front runners stop, you have to chop your stride. In front I can speed up when I feel like it, slow down when I come to a hill, judge the traffic, and do what I want to do.”

— “It’s not running, it’s flying.” This short essay from Allison Kegley about running with her 5-year-old daughter recently appeared in my local paper, the Marin Independent Journal, and captures the magical feeling that only running can bring us. “I guess they just don’t know the secret that my daughter and I know: it’s not running, it’s flying,” Kegley writes. “It’s letting go. It’s enjoying the views from the top and gliding back down again. It’s inhaling rushing air in your lungs. It’s turning off the mind and focusing on the body, a state of pure physicality. And I guess it’s the most basic perspective a 5-year-old can have: it’s not running, it’s flying.”

— This account from letsrun.com's Jonathan Gault of a recent cross-country race between Northern Arizona University, the top collegiate men’s program in the U.S., and Tokyo’s Tokai University, the reigning champions of the prestigious Hakone Ekiden. Sure, it was an early season meet that doesn’t mean squat in the grand scheme of things but it was a compelling story on a number of levels. The result—NAU edged out Tokai, 25-30—is a minor detail compared to the contrast in styles between the two teams, the level of respect NAU coach Mike Smith showed for NAU’s Japanese counterparts and just the willingness of two of the best teams in the world to throw down against one another with nothing on the line. “I think sometimes coaches can learn from that,” said. “I think sometimes that we could trade a little specificity for the relationship aspect that sport can provide. We sometimes are so specific about what we’re doing that it actually isolates us.”

— The full 2018 training plan for the Summit High School girls cross country team—aka last year’s Nike Cross Nationals team champions—that was recently posted over at ProKit, a new platform that celebrates athletes of all levels and the experiences they’re having doing the sports they love. This post contains a CRAZY amount of detail from Andy Fleming, one of the coaches at Summit, including every single workout the team did throughout the season, explanations of everything from easy runs to grass workouts to how workouts get modified, detailed descriptions of drills and strength-training exercises, and a lot more. It’s an incredible resource for coaches and athletes of any level and I personally took a lot away from it!

What I've been watching and listening to:

— The Ultra Addict with Courtney Dauwalter: Salomon TV did it again with another mesmerizing short film. In this one, Dauwalter, who just won the UTMB a few weeks ago, tackles 205 miles in one go on the Tahoe Rim Trail in 2018 and, at risk of understating it, she goes through a lot during the race. I’ve spent enough time around ultrarunners the last several years that events like 100 milers and 24-hour runs have become somewhat normalized but 205 miles at once? That’s a level of nuttiness I won't even pretend to understand.

— Like, bye. I listened to this episode of the Today, Explained podcast on the plane and it pairs well with the discussion I had last week with Amelia Boone and Brad Stulberg for my own show. It’s good food for thought about social media’s impact on our mental health and what would happen if metrics such as likes, Retweets, follower counts, etc., went away. My hot take: Such actions would send a lot of us into a weird tailspin of withdrawal, many (if not all) of these companies would likely cease to exist, influencers (and many athletes) would be out of a job, but maybe eventually we’d also be less prone to picking up our phones so much, our actual social circles would become smaller and tighter, we'd be forced to engage more with one another in person rather than just mindlessly liking and commenting on posts, and our overall emotional well-being would improve. That said, I'm not actually convinced that this is the direction things will head so it's going to continue to be on us to decide not only how we're going to use these platforms, but what role they'll play in our lives for years to come. I know that for me, my personality is addictive enough that I can't help myself once I start engaging with something that's designed to suck you in for hours on end, so I've been deliberate about what social media platforms I use (Instagram, Twitter, and Strava, specifically), where I can access them (Instagram on my iPad only, Twitter on desktop and iPad, Strava on desktop and iPad, though I'll remove it from the latter when the Fall Marathon Club I'm coaching ends in November), and how often I'll post and/or scroll feeds (this is a continual work in progress). Because at the end of the day, sometimes for better, more often for worse, social media platforms are behavior-changing—and, like most things in life, they're probably best used in moderation.

The bottom line. 

“I thought the best thing to do was to run a pace I'm used to. If the pace is too slow then I can't get into my rhythm and my body doesn't move properly.”
— The late, great Sammy Wanjiru, 2008 Olympic Marathon champion, echoing the words of Cavin Woodward, former world-record holder for 100 miles, from earlier in this newsletter.

That’s it for Issue 201. Forward this email, share the web link, or reply to me at your own risk.

Thanks for reading, 

Mario

P.S. My friend and fellow Central Massachusetts native Chaz Davis needs a little help: On November 9, Chaz, who is legally blind, will be running the Indianapolis Monumental Half Marathon and he doesn’t have a guide for the race. The catch? He’s crazy fast. Chaz’ goal is to run 1:09 (~5:15/mi pace), which would be under the world-record for his classification. If you’ve got those kind of wheels, and will be in Indy the second weekend of November, please let me know and I will put you in touch. 

P.P.S. I’m going to be in southern California later this month and I’ll be hosting a run with my friend Billy Yang on Friday, September 27, somewhere in the L.A. area. More details next week!